Alien: Story of a scene

"In space no one can hear you scream" – it was the brilliant advertising line for Alien, and it caught the creeping sense of isolation and loneliness in that unexpected film. This was a nihilistic reversal of the vague but hopeful urgings towards grand metaphysical answers in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Alien, in its gradual, threatening way, took us back to the idea of some eternal war between us and them, mankind and the black hole.

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The intriguing thing about Alien was its notion that space had become routine. So the Nostromo was a battered old spaceship on a boring mission with the kind of crew you might find on a weary freighter. It was hard at first to place all the oddballs in the crew – Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto. Sigourney Weaver's Ripley was the closest thing on board to anyone young, attractive and ready to play hero or heroine.

But there's a moment when the picture's true destination emerges. We've been to the apparently dead and deserted planet. We've gazed at the intricate, sinister design of the wreckage there. And we wonder and wait. One of the crew, Kane (John Hurt), is attacked by the creature. He is brought back to the ship where Ash (Ian Holm) tries to remove the creature which has fixed itself on to Kane's helmet. The attempt fails. Time passes. Kane eventually regains consciousness. He seems OK but he has a stiff neck and he's hungry and thirsty. Our dread builds, but we are no less astonished when he starts to choke and writhe. The first great horror in the film, and the series, is about to happen.

Now we all know – it is a classic moment. But you have to realize that in 1979 no one knew and very few could countenance the outrage that was coming as the snout, the jaws, the teeth and the malice of "it" broke through the wall of Kane's chest and sniffed the air, as fierce as Cagney smelling blood in a gangster film, as eager as a newborn babe. This was John Hurt – a big actor – being turned into a wreck. It was like seeing Marion Crane wiped away in Psycho.

The person sitting next to me – my wife – could not take it. She got up and went home. I stayed. I suppose that was for professional reasons: I was a film critic. But it was also because the hook had gone in as that mouth came out of Hurt. I knew I had never seen anything like this before, and I felt already that the idea of invasion of the human body was uncanny and alarming. In years to come, as real life picked up its own invasive diseases, it was said that Alien was a metaphor for Aids and the way the body could nurse damaging intrusions. So be it. Sci-fi is always leaning towards those grander implications. I also knew that I was under test – what next, and could I bear to look at it?